3C
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, MAY 20, 2016
BOOKS
WHAT ARE THEY READING?
1950s Manhattan and the
man who chronicled it
Columnist
told the tales
of New York
By R.J. MARX
The Daily Astorian
A
haircut from a head
hunter?
Meyer
Berger
expresses New York City as
well as any journalist I’ve read
on the topic. And there are a
lot of distinguished ones, from
Walt Whitman to Jimmy Bres-
lin, Pete Hamill and Tom Wolfe.
What I like best about Berger
— bylined Meyer, called Mike
— is his combination of high-
and low-brow, society’s upper
edge and the people who stoked
their furnaces. Berger presents
spry and poetic characters and
undomesticated scenes from the
microcosm of mid-1950s Man-
hattan in “New York: A Great
Reporter’s Love Affair with a
City,” from Fordham Univer-
sity Press.
Berger, a grammar-school
dropout who wrote the “About
New York” column for The
New York Times, bridged that
gap.
“Berger brought to spot-
light many of those New York-
ers who usually exist on the
journalistic margins,” Hamill
writes in the introduction. “They
have neither fame nor notoriety.
They never hit game-winning
home runs and do not murder
their spouses. ... And they know
things. Often, they know amaz-
ing things.”
Berger, who earned a Pur-
ple Heart in World War II, won
the Pulitzer Prize in 1950 for his
account of the murder of 13 peo-
ple by a disturbed war veteran in
Camden, New Jersey.
Eclectic characters
In this collection of columns
from 1953 to 1959, Berger
describes the city’s civil ser-
vice examiners who prepare
tests for 2,132 different civil ser-
vice jobs, mark their papers and
grade them.
He tracks down the bus
builders — Overseas Equipment
Co. — who built buses shipped
to Saudi Arabia to take pilgrims
to Mecca. Each bus was a differ-
ent color, Berger writes, except
green, which, “it seems is sacred
to Mohammed.”
There were no marriage
licenses in New York City
before 1908, Berger writes.
Up to then, ministers, magis-
trates, sea captains, aldermen
or “whoever” tied nuptial knots
and sent a record to the Health
Department.
Berger was the only New
York City Yankee to chroni-
cle the cemetery for Confeder-
ate soldiers in the borough of
Queens, where 460 Southern
Civil War dead were buried.
In his columns you can read
of the between 600 and 800
Mohawk Indians who worked
on bridges and skyscraper
construction.
Berger writes of the tailor
who dressed the Vanderbilts,
and an animal called “the soft-
eyed Panamanian oligo, kin to
the kinkajou.”
The last trolley car was
hauled out of the city by high-
way trailer-truck Nov. 3, 1958,
he reports.
Fires in mailboxes
Berger’s columns consider
ires in mailboxes and pene-
trate the secret society of orchid
breeders in Manhattan.
We read about the “grim and
fabulously wealthy real estate
operator who kept his six sisters
imprisoned in their mansion.”
In later years, two of those sis-
ters sometimes appeared in the
neighborhood dressed in “black
bombazine.”
In one column, Berger joined
1,200 Scottish gentlemen at the
Waldorf-Astoria Hotel sitting
down to “cock-a-leekie, to hag-
gis and to salmon.”
On April 20, 1955, he wrote
about “grating anglers,” treasure
hunters who dangled rope and
wire for coins underneath the
sidewalks. “They’re inclined,
almost unanimously, to be on
the misanthropic side,” Berger
comments.
Then there’s Allan Leonard
Rock, the ad man who main-
tained the archives of the hunter
and trapper Pawnee Bill, of
Pawnee Bill and the Buffalo Bill
Wild West Show.
Joe A. Munang was a Dusun
tribesman from British North
Borneo who ran a little bar-
bershop opposite St. John’s
Cathedral. “There’s something
odd about this because Joe is
descended from North Borneo
head hunters,” Berger writes.
Cigars for chimps
I laughed out loud reading
about the “mostly retired busi-
nessmen from Park and Fifth
Submitted Photo
Meyer Berger’s collection celebrates mid-20th century
New York City.
avenues who keep Joe, the Cen-
tral Park Zoo’s chimpanzee, in
cigars.”
“They unselishly give
him their brand,” Berger
adds. “They rarely pass him a
stinker.”
And a newspaper writer
might try, but he may never
be able to write a lead like this
one: “You come across some
odd collections, but you’re
not apt to match Miss Del-
phine Binger’s collection of
500,000 chicken, turkey and
goose wishbones — 20 years
accumulation. She only has
room for only a few thousand
in her two-room lat at 145
West 96th Street. Her aunts
and other kin store the rest for
her in trunks.”
‘Captain Fantastic’ a Swiss Family Robinson for today
outside with his sword. For
David Cronenberg’s “Eastern
Promises” (Mortensen’s lone
Oscar nomination), he briely
lived in Russia and suggested
his character’s extensive
Russian maia tattoos. On
“Captain Fantastic,” he built
a garden.
“I like to bring objects,
ideas. And I like to work with
directors who aren’t threat-
ened by that. It’s just my pro-
cess and it helps me,” says
Mortensen, who also writes
poetry, composes classical
music and founded his own
publishing company. “I just
want to make the most of
each moment we’re ilming,
in terms of preparing it and
doing it, but also as a human
being. This is part of my life.
It’s not just a iction.”
Mortensen stars
in ilm set in
Washington
state teepee
By JAKE COYLE
Associated Press
CANNES, France — In
the ilm “Captain Fantastic,”
Viggo Mortensen plays one of
the all-time great movie dads.
In a teepee in remote Washing-
ton state, he’s raising six chil-
dren like a modern-day Swiss
Family Robinson. The chil-
dren, well-behaved and smart,
are equally adept at skinning a
deer and reading “The Broth-
ers Karamazov” by the camp-
ire. They pine after bon-
ing knives like most kid do
iPhones.
For audiences at the Cannes
Film Festival and the Sun-
dance Film Festival (where it
irst premiered before landing
in France), “Captain Fantastic”
has resonated as a movie for
its time: a heartfelt and comic
exploration about whether
our hyper-digital, cacopho-
nous lives have strayed from
important things.
“It feels like one of those
movies that has connected
with something related to U.S.
society right now,” Mortensen
said Wednesday while smok-
ing a cigarette on a Cannes
rooftop patio. “People get
bewildered and think: `I can’t
do that. I’m not going to skin
a f---ing deer.’ But there are
other things you can do.”
Off-the-grid
The ilm is the second
directing feature for Matt
Proudly liberal
AP Photo/Joel Ryan
Actor Viggo Mortensen poses for portrait photographs for the film “Captain Fantastic” at the Cannes international film
festival in France.
Ross, a veteran actor known
to many as Gavin Belson
on HBO’s “Silicon Valley.”
In “Captain Fantastic,” the
idyll of the family’s off-the-
grid existence is challenged
when their mother dies. A
bus trip to her New Mexico
parents (long critics of their
lifestyle choices) confronts
the kids with normal Ameri-
can life and teases out ques-
tions about their highly edu-
cated but socially removed
upbringing. Should 8-year-
olds really be climbing rock
faces?
Ross acknowledges there
are some autobiographi-
cal aspects to the tale. His
mother, he says, was “a
seeker” and he grew up partly
in alternative living commu-
nities. (“They were hippie
communes but they weren’t
really hippie communes
because it was the ‘80s,” he
jokes.) He has lived in a tee-
pee in the summer and does,
like his ictional family, cel-
ebrate Noam Chomsky Day.
(“He’s my hero,” he says.)
But the ilm, which opens
in theaters July 8, mostly
came out of Ross’s own par-
enting. He and his wife, who
live in Berkeley, California,
have a 13-year-old daughter
and 8-year-old son.
“I had a lot of questions
about being a father and a
parent, and I wanted to con-
textualize it or dramatize it,”
says Ross. “And I was sort of
butting up against our culture
and who we are as a country.”
Shot in Washington
Ross shot the Paciic
Northwest half of the ilm in
Washington, and had his cast
come out two weeks early to
help build the family’s home.
“There were many things
on some scale I had to learn
for this,” says Mortensen.
“I’m not that kind of parent.
I don’t have his way of rea-
soning. But I do connect to
certain things and approve
of other things. I was very
happy to be in the woods.”
It’s the kind of preparation
that Mortensen relishes. He
lives his movies; the process
for him is as much a part of it
as the inished ilm. For “The
Lord of the Rings,” he slept
At their photo call in
Cannes, the group held up a
Bernie Sanders T-shirt. But
while “Captain Fantastic” is
proudly liberal, its conclu-
sion rests on compromise
with the father’s conserva-
tive in-laws.
Both Ross and Mortensen,
though, are trouble by the
country’s direction. “That
it’s a country of immigrants
has magically disappeared
in some people’s minds,”
Mortensen, who grew up in
Argentina, upstate New York
and Denmark, says, shaking
his head.
But ultimately, Ross hopes
“Captain Fantastic” preaches
only tolerance, compassion
and education.
“It’s asking you to be pres-
ent and not just on autopilot,”
says Ross. “I hope it has an
impact. I hope it does.”
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